


A Windshield Wiper in a Hurricane

by Frances



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Damaged People Being Damaged, F/M, Friendship/Love, Gen, No Plot/Plotless, Team Arrow, Team Bonding, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 12:04:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frances/pseuds/Frances
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What was that about ovulation?” Damn him. Damn him and his bat-like hearing. Even though he says that last word like it’s the name of a demon or a synonym for genocide, which is hilarious. <br/>Or: Because friendship means leaning on each other through bad days and good ones, the mundane and spectacular and, apparently, ignoring PTSD. Snapshots from the years of Team Arrow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Windshield Wiper in a Hurricane

**Author's Note:**

> “Love is a windshield wiper in a hurricane. Nothing is ever clear.” -Andrea Gibson, who is wonderful and you should absolutely read and listen to
> 
> Also, I haven't seen any of season 3. So please don't mention anything that happens there. 
> 
> Some kind of gross descriptions of injuries that occur off-screen. Some cursing. Also, I mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone suffering from PTSD; one of the things that annoys me most about a lot of fiction is the idea that if you're "tough" you can shake off the unshakeable. Damaging things do damage people.

A Windshield Wiper in a Hurricane

 

There are things they don’t talk about. Like the first time they went to get cupcakes and Oliver took a bite and they both silently agreed to  ignore the actual goddamn tears in his eyes. Or when Oliver asked in that way he has like he read a manual on how to talk to real people last night and wants to spend the day practicing, “Felicity, I notice you’ve never mentioned your dad. Is he...around?” and she promptly turned the police scanner up to 110 decibels in response. Or that evening there was a clap of thunder that echoed through the Foundry and Digg screamed “Grenade!” and tackled both of them to the ground, which sounds funny but was actually not at all. Felicity wonders sometimes if that’s all they are and all they’ve been, just a triangle of fucked up, propping each other up and why that’s more than enough for her.

 

He takes a huge bite of the apple and instead of the expected crunch there’s a mushy grinding sound.

Oliver chews it without reaction. “Which daughter do you think he’ll ransom? The college student or the toddler?”

Digg nods thoughtfully, not that he ever nods any other way. “Well, the toddler is legitimate but according to all sources-”

Digg probably says a lot of other things after that that she really needed to know, but Felicity leans over to look and she can see that the apple is deeply brown and soft-looking all the way through. There’s mold in little constellations around the meridian and, yep, at least three wormholes. It smells putrid. “I cannot concentrate while you’re eating that.” The words burst out of her the way they always have.

Oliver looks confused, which given that there’s no one here he’s allowed to shoot or assault isn’t that odd. “What?”

“That apple. That you’re eating. Is more disgusting than that time I actually got to see one of your ribs.”

She grabs it to show Diggle, but Oliver’s hand tightens around it protectively and he tenses into an ass-kicking pose. She lets go immediately. Felicity forgets, sometimes. It’s one of his favorite things about her.

Oliver inhales to apologize and she waves those words away. “That thing is..I’m pretty sure a starving person would not eat that.”

Oliver, as the only person present who knows just what a starving person would eat, eyes Felicity levelly and she flushes.

Diggle salvages the moment. “How old is it?”

Oliver cocks his head at her, the same way he looks at Thea’s shoe collection and people who aren’t afraid of him. “I didn’t notice.”

“Obviously.”

Diggle sighs. “All right. Since you’re hungry, let’s finish this over a late dinner.”

“Thai?” Felicity suggests.

“We shouldn’t talk about this in public,” Oliver mutters.

“Great point,” Felicity replies sarcastically, like it was for a moment even possible that her plan was to spend the evening planning their felonies in a sit-down joint.

Diggle sighs again, the halo of light from streetlamp they’re walking under and the pose of suffering making him look like a saint. “My place?”

Oliver nods quietly and throws away the apple into the next garbage can they walk by. He would probably be embarrassed, were that an emotion he’s capable of.

She just thought about it and yes, if he showed an iota of interest she would probably still make out with him right now, rotten apple breath and all. That’s just great.

 

 

 

Usually, when people say “I’m burning this outfit”, they don’t mean “I am actually going to feed pieces of this professional business ware to a fire until all that remains are ashes.”

That morning, Digg had come up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder with neither hostile intent nor creepy neck stroking and she’d still cried for fifteen minutes. Because he is definitely in the running for her favorite person (let’s just say he’s in the top three by default) he lets her get snot all over the lapels of his suit jacket and hugs her with his colossal arms. He whispers to her like she’s a spooked horse or kidnap victim. Oh, wait. She still has a lot of trouble with applying that title to her actual life and body. Just thinking it hurts.

She grabs that sequined gold dress from the darkest corner of her closet because it’s coming too.

“Couldn’t you just donate them?” Oliver had asked last night, careful to give her space, not understanding that space was the last thing she wanted.

It was about fifteen minutes after he’d bowhunted someone through a window and a mere half hour since she’d sat tied to a chair by a man threatening to rape her with all but the actual words. They were back under the club and she was ripping her clothing off and trying to explain why. Oliver had turned around as soon as it became apparent what she was doing so she is talking to his leather-y back. It’s depressingly similar to talking to his face.

“I thought about that,” She explains, trying to tune out the defeat in her tone. “But then what if one day I’m walking around and I run into whoever bought it and I have an incredibly public nervous breakdown. That might actually be worse, and let’s remember that worse has been thoroughly redefined this evening. I’m going to need to cut my hair off, pronto.”

“Whatever you want,” He replies to that absently. “We’ve got a firepit on the grounds.”

“Are you inviting me over to your house, no, I’m sorry, mansion, to burn this outfit?”

The back of his head dipped into a nod and his hands clenched into a fist. “You said you need to know you’ll never see it again.”

“I did say that,” She acknowledges. “It would probably be cheaper than a therapist.” He inhales to speak and she interrupts before she has to waste the rest of this evening orating on boundaries. “And if the next words out your mouth are an offer to pay for a therapist; your credit rating will never again be higher than 500.”

“...I’ll invite Diggle? Or did you want to do this alone?” He sounds unsure, says the sentences like each word is a rock in a river and any second one of them could roll away beneath him, like he never intended to be talking for this long.

She considers this. “Let’s aim for a wake. And then afterwards we’ll go inside and we’ll finally start Firefly, like you’ve been promising me for over a year. .”

“Okay.”

“It’s a date,” she replies breezily and then hates herself.

He pretends not to hear her because no one’s ungracious all the time.

They have to reschedule it three times, because the criminals of Starling have made it abundantly clear they care about neither her sex life nor her need for dramatic gestures to get past traumatic events. But between that and an unhealthy interest in reminding herself that he’s _dead_ , dead, so incredibly not living, if he wants to get her he’ll have to open a portal from hell, she stops feeling quite like a boulder is crushing her sternum everywhere she goes. So there’s that.

  
  


 

 

“Oliver.”

“Yes?”

“You’re...uh, you’re dripping.”

His looks at his armpits first which is almost endearing and then back at her blankly.

“Um, no, I didn’t mean like that...”

There’s a tiny bloodstain on his back that’s blooming steadily, courtesy of a henchmen who probably doesn’t even has health insurance but is now down three tendons.

She glances around this office with its stupid glass walls and finds them apparently alone. “Uh, take off your shirt and meet me in the bathroom. No, I mean, reverse that.” Oliver waits politely for her to somehow make that statement worse and when she doesn’t, stands to obey.

Felicity rips the old, now soaked dressing away to get a better look and he doesn’t flinch even though the skin is red and irritated wherever there used to be tape. She doesn’t bother with gloves anymore, assuming that he would have told her by now if he had Hepatitis or any normal hobbies. She dabs away the absolute sheet of blood, trying to gag silently and finally sees the problem. Two stitches that have been jaggedly torn away, leaving little flapping edges of skin that she is positive will haunt her the next time she tries to eat baklava.

“Oliver,” She stretches each syllable out. “Push ups in the office? Seriously?”

His guilty wince and silence is the only answer she needs.

She sighs again. “It’s like you don’t even want all six liters of blood in your stupid hot body.”

“I thought I would notice.” He tries to explain. “If I was pushing it too far.”

“Welp,” She replies. “Compelling evidence to the contrary, all over your shirt. Stay put. I’ll go get the suture kit. Yet another scar.”

He scoffs at that. One more scar on his torso is like one more auction on Ebay.

“Thank you,” He says when she’s done quilting those abrasion into a unified whole. And then again, like he’s trying to make up for all the times he forgets, “Thank you.”

 

 

 

“So then he told me, and I quote, that he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have anything, like diseases, okay you already knew what he meant by that and also that he’s definitely not ready to be a father, so if that’s how this ends up I am on my own. So men are the ultimate and absolute worst. God, sorry, I didn’t mean you, I’m sure you’d be a perfect gentleman if the condom broke..”

“He seriously said that?” Diggle comments in the warm yet dangerous tone of someone that really wants her to be the happiest and have everything and is shocked and disappointed in a world that refuses to get with the program. She basks in that sound for a second.

“He did. And while I am pretty sure I am not ovulating; I’m been too busy with these two full time jobs to really keep track of menstruating, you know? I mean, obviously you don’t but-”

The Foundry door opens and mercifully that sentence dies. Oh, perfect. Oliver. Just what this personal crisis did not require.

“Digg. Felicity,” He greets them.

Digg’s eyes flicker between them and the corners of his mouth start to curve upward.

“What was that about ovulation?” Damn him. Damn him and his bat-like hearing. Even though he says that last word like it’s the name of a demon or a synonym for genocide, which is hilarious.

Oliver raises his eyebrows and then she repeats everything she said to Digg, only somehow with even more tangents and greater empathy for people he interrogates.

He’s silent for an awkwardly long time and for a second she’s afraid he’s judging her or something, which would make him not to the person she thought he was and a massive hypocrite but would also really hurt.

“What did you say his last name was?” Oliver asks in tone he clearly believes is off-handed.

“No. No way, mister. There are vigilante problems and there are personal problems and you can’t shoot everyone.”

He smiles at that. “I can try.”

“Felicity,” Digg interrupts in a low, steady tone. “Is there anything you want me to pick up for you?”

“Ice cream?”

“Sure, but I mostly meant from the pharmacy.”

“Oh. OH. Yeah, that would be great. Anyway, if it’s you know, the worst case scenario I have to decide if I even want to call him-”

“I could call him for you,” Oliver chimes in.

“Um, no. Thank you. No, thank you.”

Ultimately, it is revealed through reviewing her own purchases that she’s been so stressed-out and sleep deprived she hasn’t actually been fertile in two months. She’s so happy when all the tests she takes for the rest of that month come back negative she hugs Oliver in the middle of his workout, which is everything she thought it’d be with slightly more BO.

  
  


 

 

They kneel in front of the gravestone, ignore the way John’s hand shakes when he traces the letters.

Felicity spreads out a blanket featuring cartoon pandas peering from in between bamboo shoots and then spreads out various take-out containers on it. “I brought us food. By that I mean I used Oliver’s money to buy us an unholy amount of greasy take-out.” Oliver raises exactly one shoulder in a shrug at that revelation and she ploughs on. “But if you’d rather be alone or if you think this isn’t respectful or-”

“Thank you, Felicity.” Digg says in such a way that those syllables really count and she finishes unpacking.

Oliver pulls a flask out of his pocket. “A drink?”

Digg shakes his head so Felicity nabs it and takes a generous swig.

They chew slowly and Oliver teaches her how to really use chopsticks and Digg looks up at clouds, careful not to mention that these days they’re all shaped like bloodstains.

Digg interrupts his own silence. “I don’t think I’d feel any better about this if I’d killed Lawton.”

“You wouldn’t,” Oliver tells him softly and they know better than to ask him why he sounds so sure.

Diggle sighs and rests his back against the gravestone, the closest thing he’ll ever get to a brother at his back.A lifetime as an only child, the survivor, awaits him and whenever he thinks about it feels like a purgatory.

“I wish it was me instead, sometimes. He had Carly and AJ and I didn’t. No one was counting on me like that.” He finally says, now knowing he felt that way until he’d actually said it.

“I’m glad it wasn’t.” Felicity says and then audibly chokes. “God, I don’t mean I’m glad it was him, I just mean..I’m glad you’re alive. I really want you to stay that way. You’re not replaceable, you’re you and sometimes knowing you’re there means everything and...I’m glad I met you and I really need you. Like, if something ever happened to you that would end my world for a while.”

Oliver squeezes his forearm twice since they aren’t the type for hugs. “We both need you. We should do this more often.” He finally offers and they both know he means sit quietly under the blue sky and talk about things that matter.

 

 

 

“Are you her brother?” Oliver’s head shoots up.

“Yes. Yes, I’m all she has.” As Diggle had proven just who he was willing to kill for and put a bullet in Merlin earlier that evening. Then he shot him two times with the rocket launcher to be sure. Roy had been less trusting and spent ten gory minutes severing his head and dousing what was left in lighter fluid; he’s still burning his incriminating clothes and exfoliating the blood and smoke away in the Foundry.

“She’s stable, but she’ll need at least two units of blood. Are you her biological brother?” The nurse, accustomed to addressing the shell shocked and heart wounded, speaks with slow articulate phrases.

“Yes, mostly.” In every way that counts but this one. “I’m B positive.”

The nurse frowns at that. “The patient is A negative. We’re out of units; the delivery didn’t make it this morning..” There’s two inches of ice on every flat outdoor surface and the ditches are littered with fender benders and pile-ups. They’d had to flag down a snow plow and bribe the driver to even get Thea here.

Oliver looks into her eyes like that answer that will spare his sister’s life is written on her retinas. “Where can I get the blood she needs?”

The nurses sighs. “Only about 5 percent of the population is A negative, but I’ll ask around the waiting room; maybe we’ll get lucky-”

Oliver has the look of someone fully prepared to misunderstand statistics and kidnap the next twenty people he sees. Felicity blurts out. “Me! I mean, I have that. What you need. In my veins right now. How do we do this?”

Oliver seizes her face in his hands and looks at her like he always does but more, like she’s the cure for cancer or the holy grail, the hostage coordinates and the water cache . “Thank you,” he says with a desperate lilt to the words.

What she says back is, “Don’t thank me, thank genetics.” But before she goes to bleed for Oliver again (and cries throughout because she is only fearless when she has to be) for a tiny selfish instant she savors that contact.

The facts are this: Merlin had shown up with his only heir to wipe the floor with all of them and an inadequately brainwashed Thea who had volunteered as a meat shield for Roy. That had not gone well for Merlin but was also not the Queen sibling reunion Oliver had been hoping for.

A raw-skinned Roy is silently but openly weeping; Thea breaths easy in the warm embrace of awesome, awesome drugs. Felicity is loopy and the other two thirds of her triumvirate are stoics. Because everyone else finds Oliver distractingly attractive too, they are all permitted to squeeze on the couch and chairs in her room in one gloomy collective.

“You know,” Felicity begins. “Nevermind. Let’s be honest, obviously you don’t. So Thea’s A and you’re B. I’m gonna hazard a guess here and say that neither your mom nor your dad had AB type blood.”

Oliver sees the shape of what she’s saying immediately because while he’s an idiot he’s far from stupid. “No, they didn’t. It was always obvious, wasn’t it?”

“I’m just saying that if you both hadn’t gotten Cs in biology that cat would have been out of the bag decades ago.”

Oliver huffs a laugh at that, like he’s heard of humor but thought it was something they only did in France. Felicity wants that sound on an mp3 file and yeah, she said all that out loud, he’s chuckling with something a lot closer to mirth now. “I’m just happy she’s here.”

“Me too.” Felicity slurs. Diggle offers her another juice box, which she sips violently. Oliver rolls up her sleeve to make sure the wrap at the crook of her elbow is holding and then goes back to staring the heart monitor into submission, daring it to offer him bad news. “Gonna fall asleep on you. If she needs more blood, for the love of Google don’t wake me up, just take it.”

“Whatever you say,” He murmurs and kisses the top of her head. It feels like a benediction or maybe just something depressingly platonic.

  
  


 

 

He tests the sharpness of the arrow against the tip of his own pinky, seems pleased when it draws a line of blood, the freak. He sets it back on the table with far more care than he takes with his own bones. Oliver steeples his fingers and peers at her over them and Felicity has a stressful moment of wondering if she’d called him a freak out loud.

“Thank you.” Okay, probably not.

She double-checks that they are genuinely the only two people in the Foundry and that none of the comms are on. “For what?”

He cocks his head to the side, apparently wanting his expression to be a revelation but despite an exquisite and hard-won intelligence she has no clue what he’s on about.

“It’s been three years.”

“...Yeah. Are you thanking me for time passing? Because-”

Most of the time, he listens to her carry on with genuine amusement and the cousin’s former roommate of a smile on his face. Tonight he interrupts with a tiny apologetic wince. “I never expected to survive this long.”

“Um. As far as your survival goes, shouldn’t you be thanking solar stills or the insects of Lian Yue or your father-” Great job, Felicity.Bring up that story.  “Instead?”

“I mean after the island,” He inhales and manages to explain himself. “I never expected to survive longer than six months as the vigilante; I was just hoping it would be enough. But here I am now and I was thinking about it...”

He pauses long enough for her to inquire, “Was that the end of that story?”

“And you’re the difference. Digg, too. So thank you for saving my life...and for making it better.” He says it like a vow he has some intention of keeping and she feels her face melt into a totally gooey expression of joy with a heaping order of blatant adoration.

“You are most welcome.”

And then Oliver starts sanding down another arrowhead like it’s fine and normal to say something like that and they have this conversation on Wednesdays and there’s no need to elaborate. Felicity memorizes the sounds of those syllables, knowing the day she’ll need those words is coming quickly.

  
  


 

 

“Oh my gosh,” She croons in a way that would humiliate her in any other circumstance. “Look at his teeny tiny socks!”

“They are for a tiny person.” Oliver notes, eying the baby the way he must have once gazed at calculus problems.

“No shit,” Felicity starts to say and then clamps a hand over her mouth, casting ashamed eyes down towards this smaller and smellier version of Digg. “He’s just so precious. Usually babies kind of freak me out, with their total dependence and floppy necks and non-calcified brain casing but...”

And that preposition is it. She has no real counter-argument to those clearly defined downsides but a strong feeling, something incontrovertible between protectiveness and relief.

Oliver trails a single finger down the face of this totally new and whole thing and flinches visibly when the newborn’s minute fingers can’t even wind all the way around his index finger. It occurs to Felicity that Oliver looked like this once, was at one point totally untested and unbroken. He smiles then, his face full of a tenderness that is almost always expressed as someone else’s still corpse or his own flayed body.

“I wonder if we can get a flak jacket in his size,” Oliver muses in that way when he’s barely aware he’s actually talking out loud (Felicity is an expert in what that sounds like).

“I was actually thinking the same thing,” Digg interjects from behind them.

Oliver clasps hands with him, wrapping the opposite forearm around Digg’s shoulder. “Congratulations, man. He’s perfect.” He’s looking at Felicity with a totally unidentifiable gaze as he says this, like he’s either committing the scene to memory or trying his best to replace it with feelings he actually knows how to handle and is therefore hoping someone shows up to pull out his fingernails any second.

Digg smiles in a moony sort of way. “Yeah. I know. Thanks.”

“Lyla?” Felicity asks. “Is everything okay? I know you said it wasn’t a big deal but you also said that they had to keep her in the room a little longer until...Is she okay now?”

“Totally fine,” Digg continues with a more reserved smile. “The afterbirth finally came out, so I’m actually here to collect this little guy to go meet his mother.”

“Gross,” Felicity blurts out. “But great. I’m glad...Nothing bad should ever happen to you so I’m glad that it didn’t.”

She foists the tiny mewling thing back on Diggle. Oliver laughs at her stiff care, says he’s seen her take less attention with a hostage trade-off. She retorts, saying that he would probably rather stab himself than try to hold a newborn. Oliver considers that, and nods. “Only if the blade were shorter than two inches.”

Felicity chuckles at that, a rare response to Oliver’s presence.

“This going to make things complicated. Different.” Digg says to both of them but his eyes are on Oliver.

“We’ll make it work,” is his quiet response because he finally knows better than to offer to let Digg leave.

“Damn straight,” Digg answers and then looks down at his son with a short, shamed grimace tempered with unapologetic wonder.

 

 

 

By the time she comes to Diggle is digging a firepit and Oliver is twisting vines and sharpened sticks into something very Indiana Jones-esque. They’re both crouched to low-slung structure of branches and leaves. He seems to know the instant she wakes up and gingerly sets his work down and kneels next to her, finding a pulse on her neck without permission. His hand leaves a sticky spot when he pulls it back.

“Your heartrate is a little elevated,” He tells her, like that’s how people start conversations and like it isn’t totally obvious why that might be.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” She mutters bitterly, looking up at the towering tulip poplars in every direction in rapidly fading light, an inescapable and pretty awful truth slowly creeping to the forefront of her mind.

He ignores that and comes back with a leaf. “Dig up any tuber with a leaf that looks like this.”

“As soon as you say please. Shouldn’t we look for water first?”

Oliver tilts his head towards the trickling sound about twenty feet away from them. “Already done.”

“Not to be a downer, but why are we here?”

Diggle joins, tension obvious down every line of his body. “Felicity. Glad to see you’re up.”

“At least someone is.” She mutters.

“Psycho of the week dropped us out here, told Oliver and me that we had a ten minute head start.”

Felicity shudders and Diggle continues. “Relax. That...didn’t exactly work out for him.”

“Oh,” She murmurs, looking through twilight at Oliver’s and Digg’s hands that are not just bloody but covered with all manner of fluid. “Let’s just be glad I didn’t come to for that party. It does not sound like my scene. Not to be gauche,” she continues, “But what did we do with the body?”

Oliver looks at her with a thousand yard stare and she looks between him and Digg and Digg nods just slightly. She understands that he’s probably scraping the bottom on the sanity barrel right now, not that you can really store sanity because if you could she would order it for him in bulk. “I buried him a mile out. He should attract all the scavengers, at least for tonight.”

Diggle answers the question she doesn’t ask. “No cell phone, no radio.”

“So we’re here until...?” She whispers quietly.

Oliver stares at her again with animal eyes, ‘Until we’re not. Come on. I’ll show you where the traps are.” She makes sure there’s a good distance between them before she starts this conversation. Digg moves to her side and angles his shoulder in front of her. If Oliver notices, it’s not because he cares.

“Oliver. We are in the Pacific Northwest, not Lian Yu. We can and will walk out of here.” His head shoots up and his brow crinkles, seldom-used gears turning. “Don’t be stupid. We’ll sleep here tonight and head East in the morning. I’d bet we don’t make it more than seven miles before we hit a hiking trail or a highway.”

He stares at her. “Felicity?”

“That’s right. Furthermore, didn’t you already kill everyone that wanted to kill us?”

He nods slowly like he remembers doing something like that but isn’t positive it wasn’t a dream. Oliver inhales to argue and she forces herself to remember how many times he’s thrown his own body in front of hers so she doesn’t shake him until his addled brain topples out.

“So tomorrow morning before we go take down all the spikes. I’ll find us some tubers for dinner, you start on the fire.”

“I’ll get the kindling,” Digg murmurs, allowing him to save face. Oliver shakes his head twice and stands up, suddenly human again.

“I’ll come with,” When Oliver’s only company is his paranoia, when the two of them are out of earshot she asks. “Why’d you let his little craft project go that far? Not that it’s your job to babysit, I mean obviously it is since you have an actual baby, but..”

“It was an unusually healthy coping mechanism.”

“Coping with what? This is a pretty manageable level of absurd. It’s actually the closest thing I’ve had to a vacation so far this year.”

“ We were getting antsy when you didn’t wake up when we did.”

“Oh.”

The tubers are rubbery and unsatisfying, but she eats every bite so Oliver will stop looking at her like she’s written in Sanskrit but has the secrets of the universe carved into her teeth.

The next morning, one of her heels (The ones of her shoes, though so there’s that) breaks exactly 400 feet into their hike along the creekbed. Oliver stoops down in front of her matter-of-factly, telling her that they’re burning daylight when she hesitates.

It’s actually only four miles to a river and a fisherman with a cellphone. He carries her every step.

  
  


 

 

When they finally found him, there’s only Digg and Roy available for whoop ass duty so Felicity has joined them with a custom taser and body armor under a mountain range of protests from the two of them.

He’s handcuffed to a radiator, hands behind his back. She sees him, he’s hurt and hobbled and now she understands why he always leaves a body whenever he comes to get one of them because if one of them walked through that door right now is she is truly not sure how far she would go.

But most importantly, he is alive. She kneels down and kisses him hard, his face grasped firmly between her hands.

Felicity smells something that will forever ruin her for barbecues and understands that they kept the radiator on while he was tied to it.

“Oh, God, Oliver, your hands.” The right one, closest to the radiator has a hot handcuff burrowed almost a centimeter in at the wrist. The left one has numerous dislocations and swellings. The cuffs and the radiator both show numerous dents and signs of fatigue. He tried to get loose until physiology prevented it. She digs around in her bag under she finds the wire cutters. In the background she hears the unmistakable artificial sound of Digg zip tieing felons and Roy’s grunts of effort drowned out by a lot of other grunts of pain.

“It’ll burn your hands.” He tells her, so she cuts a link free without touching it. Oliver lets his arms swing forward with a grunt of relief. He rolls the right shoulder, but not the left one because it’s also dislocated. Excellent.

“We thought you were dead,” She tells him because that’s what all the evidence suggested but they came here anyway. She kisses him again, slower, even though he has obviously not been allowed a toothbrush in his time here. Felicity strokes his neck gently, opens her mouth against his. She’s pretty sure he groans but she could have just brushed the bad shoulder.

“Um,” Roy begins but clearly has no follow up.

“Erm,” agrees Felicity, without turning around. “Help me relocate his shoulder. Which is what I was doing just now. Though not that well, obviously.”

The only response Roy has is to gag at the smell.

In the end Diggle has to carry him out because of his gangrened ankles. Then he has to help shower which is something Felicity would pay good money to see for a number of reasons.

Oliver has to swallow a small pharmacy and Digg puts him on an IV drip. His apology seems sincere when he misses the vein at first and Felicity understands that she’s been selfish, that Digg has believed he’d failed someone he loved just as much just as thoroughly. Digg takes a single deep breath and forces his hands to stop shaking. Oliver thanks him in that solemn way that people would probably part with a kidney to hear.

It’s ruled that he’ll stay with Felicity for a couple of days because, “Oliver, you can’t even put on a pair of pants right now.” which is a hard argument to win when Roy just had to tie your shoes for you. It will be days before even the corroded and burned hand can be used for something other than a semi-living paperweight.

Later that night, the argument continues when Oliver tells her that he will only intrude on her hospitality for one night and will be leaving in the morning.  He still tries to intimidate her a little, his only real conversational strategy, even though he’s reclining on her grandmother’s couch and currently has the combat prowess of an undercooked noodle.

“On top of everything else, there’s that part where I was so happy to see you I awkwardly stuck my tongue in your mouth. So, I probably owe you one.”

He murmurs something softly, eyes downcast, a distinct and sudden change from his former demeanor. “What?” Felicity asks.

“ I said that wasn’t awkward. For me, at least.”.

“Oh. Wow. Really?”

“Yes.”

Oliver tries to wriggle under the blanket and nudge it up farther up his body. He’s tilting his head down to bite the blanket in his teeth when Felicity does it for him, tucking it around his shoulders with her perfectly functional joints. “We are revisiting this conversation when your hands are better.” He chuckles, a sound punctuated with a cough “I didn’t mean, I just meant that we both had better things to be worrying about for the night, not that your hands wouldn’t be excellent, sweet God I am still talking.”

He grins up at her. “I’d love to. Next weekend?”

Felicity nods down at him in her best approximate of a stately manner, knowing she can do a little happy dance later, in private. “Sounds good. Don’t forget.”

 

 

 

It was quiet, except for the hiss of a couple still-burning fires. Starling looked like...looked like a city with an annual tragedy for the past four fucking years. People had died, again, because some megalomaniac with something to prove had chosen this has his proving ground, again. They’d fought against the impossible, they’d bled, they won. Rinse and repeat, only the stains never really come all the way out.

“Can...” Felicity sets weight on her ankle and the leg attached to it gives. Diggle, with neither hesitance nor respect for her personal space, steadies her with the arm attached to the shoulder that wasn’t dislocated twice tonight.

Oliver cries the dust out of his eyes, they leave streaks down the centers of his cheeks. “There’s ace bandages and ice packs back at the van.” Oliver tells them, dizzy and confused at the heartbeat still thrumming in his wrists. He never really stops believing that one of these times they’re all going to die. He’s done outliving anyone.

“And eyewash.” Felicity says, with a rasp that is not at all sexy but is rather suggestive of early-stage throat cancer.

Oliver nods at that, nods like he thinks his neck might fall off. The three of them start picking their damn slow way back over this brand spanking new rubble. Felicity imagines the specks of light in front of her eyes are the glistening thing that has tied them together through everything, given that everything turned out to be worse and more than ever and okay maybe she’s actually pretty dehydrated.

A rat makes a piece of a tin roof clatter loudly and both men shoot it before they realize that this war, at least is over. They stumble into the back, they put each other back together again. Felicity sips at a liter of clean water that is needed just as desperately elsewhere but was kept here because there are people with power and foresight who love her.

“Can we just get out of here? For a while?. Like, let’s get cleaned up and I’ll let everyone who cares know that we all lived, like Thea and Roy and the Lances because it’s complicated with them but not that complicated and I know Lyla and 2.0 are in some wifi-free safehouse in a Slavic country,” Felicity continues, distracted for a moment by both the blooming tenderness at just how many people “everyone who cares” has grown to include and a deep, potent longing to be somewhere salty and clean with just the three of them. “But I can get ahold of her. We don’t be able to do anything here that the Red Cross can’t, actually we should get away just so we aren’t extra mouths to feed. So. Thesis statement: Pass on that we lived, vacation. Try to forget that any of this happened, but that part goes without saying.” She waits for sensible voices to tell her that that cannot happen and why.

“You need a hospital.” Oliver tells her

“Ignoring how funny it is that you are saying those words to me, other places have those. And I need this a lot more.”

“Okay. No forests.”

“I’ll drive.” Diggle’s word seems to decide them. “But not to a desert, either.”

For the first time in way too long, Felicity actually smiles.

They listen to a trashy Dan Brown book on tape on the way down. They spend four days swimming, cooking elaborate meals they lack the expertise and appetite for, playing Risk. Dig teaches them how to crochet and Oliver makes a scarf so lumpy they ceremonially bury in the backyard. They play more Risk but not Monopoly because they still want to be friends later, make homemade pastries and ravioli and cook meat over fires and Diggle rubs thistle instead of fennel on it by accident. They take naps in a big pile on bigger beds and she notices that Oliver always ends up on her right with the very tips of his fingers resting on her forearm. It’s memories and something to smile about and the ugliest shell necklace in creation. It’s Diggle finally getting control of Asia and Oliver going an entire 12 hours without practicing murder. It’s to healing what a warm bath is to a hospital stay but waking up stops hurting.

She makes them listen to Taylor Swift on the way home and even though they’ve never backed away from a lost battle doesn’t mean they don’t know one when they see it.

 

 

 

People stare at them everywhere they go now and it’s not exactly in attraction. They slump down into the chairs, Digg with a pained and stiff jerk halfway through the action. Oliver distributes menus and Felicity unwraps napkins from silverware. Digg breaths carefully through his nose until the soreness in his knees lets up.

Oliver mutters something about old men and their bones and gets an incredibly brief and classy middle finger for his trouble.

“So,” As tradition dictates, Felicity asks. “Would we rather split entrees or are people feeling greedy?”

Oliver drums his fingers on the table while he decides, in such a way that a couple passerby notice he only has seven fingers between his two hands. “I feel like some variety. Dig?”

“I feel hungry, so how about we just decide?”

“Done and done,” Felicity tells them cheerfully. Her smile grin tugs at parallel scars, a couple inches apart, that begin on her left cheekbone and end around the region of her bellybutton. They’re only silvery canals now, the subject of many double takes. It mostly blends in with the stretch marks on her belly, the ones that never faded.

“How about tikka masala, lentil curry, naan and mango lassi?” Felicity asks, picking the first his item under each heading on the menu..

The men nod their assent. Digg tells them an elaborate story about his youngest’s beetle colony, a piece of roadkill, and the first date of AJ, now his son through a series of tragedies worthy of a Lifetime movie. Felicity is openly weeping from laughter and Oliver chuckles into his Indian food. Digg mimes a nervous 5-year-old chewing on his fingernails, waiting for his father’s wrath and the pale white light of the restaurant catches the bare nailbeds.

Felicity shows him the picture of the outfit their daughter had dressed Oliver in.

“The tutu suits you, man,” He tells him and Oliver smiles softly in response, eyebrows raised in an wordless reminder that seven times out of ten he still wins.

“I like to think so,” Oliver says, caressing the edges of the image for a second.  He adjusts the watch on his wrist where it sits awkwardly against a tapestry of contused scars, against an arm that looks like a tiger chewed on it (one did). They eat enough food for a platoon, but still not as much as they used to.

“Thanks for the family dinner, gentlemen.” Felicity says with a mock salute, when it’s been hours of chatter and increasingly malevolent glares from the waiter. “Digg, you’re on for family and friends barbecue on Sunday? If Lyla’s mother is over again you’re welcome to say that we need you to come help set up starting in the morning.

“Felicity Smoak, I would like that more than anything. If I had to hear that woman say one more word equating a non-vegan diet with child abuse...” He shakes his head to dispel the thought.

“Whose turn is it to pick the movie on Wednesday?” Oliver muses.

“You, though you’d know that if you ever looked at our planner.”

He smiles down at her steadily and she flushes and averts her gaze. “I like hearing you say it.”

She snorts in self-disgust. “When is that going to stop working on me?”

“I’m hoping for never.”

“I’m hoping Oliver picks something with fewer than four explosions.”

Oliver crinkles his brow in actual confusion. “What would be the point of that?”

A man with two open cellphones in one hand and a coffee caddy in the other tries to edge around Felicity’s left side. She bumps into him and he mutters something that only John hears.  Digg grabs his shoulder and he doesn’t blanch. “She’s blind in that eye,” he says, “So now you’re going to apologize.”

Digg’s tone may be easy enough to argue with but his biceps are not. The man stutters some genuinely contrite words and they move on.

“Why didn’t you tell me there was someone trying to get around me on my bad side?” Felicity hisses at Oliver.

He shrugs and his eyes sweep upward, watching the skyline. “I’m sorry, but his hands were too full to be carrying a weapon. I wasn’t paying attention to him.”

Her anger evaporates, like it always does eventually. “Let’s go home.”

Oliver smiles at that. “Maybe we’ll get some sleep.”

“Not for three more years, you won’t.” Digg tells them.

Felicity sighs. “This is the last one.”

“Tell yourself that at two this this morning.”

“And four and six. I will be,” She says and they both hug Digg goodbye, even though Oliver does so like he learned how from a CPR poster. .

“I’ll see you both tomorrow,” Digg tells them.

“I can’t wait,” Oliver responds, realizing he doesn’t even need to remind himself to sound sincere.


End file.
